What is a conversation policy?

In this paper we define the concept of conversation policies: declarative s pecifications that govern communications between software agents using an a gent communication language. We discuss the role that conversation policies play in agent communication, and suggest several subtypes of conversation policy. Our reasoning suggests, contrary to current transition net approach es to specifying conversation policies that conversation policies are best modeled as sets of fine-grained constraints on ACL usage. These constraints then define the computational process models that are implemented in agent s.